Transformative Works and Cultures, special issue: Fandom and/as labor, No. 15 (March 15, 2014) Editorial Mel Stanfill & Megan Condis, Fandom and/as labor Praxis Bethan Jones, Fifty shades of exploitation: Fan labor and Fifty Shades of Grey Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, Ashley Liles, The media festival volunteer: Connecting online and on-ground fan labor Christina Savage, Chuck versus the ratings: Savvy fans and "save our show" campaigns Giacomo Poderi & David James Hakken, Modding a free and open source software video game: "Play testing is hard work" Bertha Chin, Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan sites as gifts or exploited labor? Rose Helens-Hart, Promoting fan labor and "all things Web": A case study of Tosh.0 Matthias Stork, The cultural economics of performance space: Negotiating fan, labor, and marketing practice in Glee’s transmedia geography Symposium Tisha Turk, Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy Joly MacFie, Better Badges: Image as virus Interview Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, & Luke Pebler, Veronica Mars Kickstarter and crowd funding Review Stephanie Anne Brown, Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory, edited by Trebor Scholz Simone D. Becque, Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor, edited by Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut Anne Kustritz, Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal, by J. Jack Halberstam Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 15 (2014) Editorial Fandom and/as labor Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United States [0.1] Keywords—Community; Gift economy; Media industry; Value; Work Stanfill, Mel, and Megan Condis. 2014. "Fandom and/as Labor" [editorial]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0593. 1. Introduction [1.1] It has long been recognized both within academia and in the various communities organized around fandom that the practice of being a fan does not merely consist of passive consumption. Rather, fans are also producers, making everything from interpretations of their favorite television shows to extratextual products like wikis, fan fiction, and fan videos to data about their own consumption habits and those of their peers that can be used to market new products. It is now well established that watching television can usefully be conceptualized as work (Jhally and Livant 1986; Smythe 1977), and a labor framing has been applied to user­generated content by critical media studies scholars (Andrejevic 2009; Fuchs 2012; Hesmondhalgh 2010). However, fans have not often been approached this way. This disjuncture partially comes from the fact that fan activity is by all appearances both freely chosen and understood as pleasure, neither of which is typically associated with work. Instead, fan action has been framed as being active or participatory, and while these conceptualizations have been productive, when the lens of labor is applied, unique and crucial questions come into view. [1.2] To speak of labor is to attend to the value fans generate—an antidote to surprisingly tenacious notions of fan activity as a valueless pleasure. Once we have conceptualized fan work as generating value, we can also inquire into how that value is distributed and whether work circulating between fans in gift economies or among fans and industry is potentially exploited labor. This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures takes the premise that if fans are a vital part of the new economy, then we have to take the economy part as seriously as the vital part. When such a stance is taken, it turns out that fan labor, like duct tape or the Force, has a dark side and a light side, and it holds the universe—or at least fandom—together. The contributors to this special issue demonstrate a wide variety of ways that labor functions in fandom. 2. Come to the dark side (We use cookies—see our privacy policy) [2.1] In the contemporary moment, labor issues are once again coming to the forefront of many people's political consciousness. When we proposed this topic, the February and March 2011 Wisconsin union protests were recent events, and Occupy Wall Street and its discourse of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent was still to come. Since then, this sort of conflict around labor and the distribution of resources to workers has become ever more central, with Walmart and fast­food worker strikes forming part of an increasingly mainstream struggle over dignified working conditions and a living wage. [2.2] Labor conditions in media are also in the midst of a large­scale transformation. There was a marked increase over the first decade of the 21st century in what used to be called runaway production (and is now maybe just production), with TV series increasingly being produced in Canada and films increasingly being made in New Zealand. The same period saw an explosion of unscripted series. Both of these production strategies employ writers, actors, directors, and other personnel in ways that skirt the terms of union contracts in order to lower labor costs (Lotz 2007). One major issue in the 2007–8 Writers Guild of America strike was an insistence that Web content was creative work and creators were thus eligible to be paid at creative rates, rather than promotional work that creators were obligated to participate in for free (Gray 2010; Leaver 2013; Russo 2010). The kinds of paratexts or pieces of ancillary content that were at stake in the WGA strike are quite like what fans produce, and turning to fans rather than paid staff for such work thus looks increasingly good for the bottom line. After all, even against the baseline of declining labor strength in Hollywood, fan work is a bargain for industry. [2.3] Fan value creation—in terms of meaning, loyalty, commitment, and promotion—is not new, but industry recognition and encouragement, as well as the contemporary expansion of monetization, are. The contemporary era has seen technologically enabled visibility of fan practices that in many instances existed before current media technologies (Bacon­Smith 1991; Coppa 2008; Jenkins 1992). One of the first to make sense of user activity on the Internet as labor was Tiziana Terranova (2000, 37), who contended that "free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited." We find that simultaneity of pleasure and exploitation to be key. [2.4] For example, the video game industry has long been working to blur the line between labor and play in its own ranks by recruiting fans as beta testers for games that are about to be released. Companies routinely emphasize the benefits and the prestige associated with early access: alpha and beta testers are said to have the ear of game makers, to be influential in shaping the final product. Similar rhetoric abounds in recruitment materials aimed at young workers looking to break into the industry. Entry­level workers, like game testers (otherwise known as QA, for quality assurance), are promised a paying job that hardly feels like work at all. Who wouldn't want to spend their day earning money for doing something that they were already doing just for fun? Game industry workplaces are designed to create an atmosphere that further reinforces a playful aesthetic. Employees describe "an ambience of 'cool' built up around unregulated hours, lax dress code, studio pranks, free food, fitness facilities, lavish parties, funky interior design, and an array of other perks and promises" (Dyer­Witheford and de Peuter 2006, 604). Some gaming companies have built entire marketing strategies around the notion that they are fun places to work: Sony, the maker of Playstation game consoles, made three seasons' worth of reality television competitions called The Tester in which it gave away QA jobs as the grand prizes (The Tester 2014). [2.5] Unfortunately for fans who aspire to become industry professionals, the realities of game testing are far less glamorous than they initially appear. Game testing is a brutal, monotonous, repetitive, poorly paid, insecure job—and testers aren't the only ones in the games industry with grievances. Even workers with more prestigious, higher­level jobs in the industry run afoul of exploitative labor practices, such as crunch time, an "industry term that indicates an apparently unusual period of crisis in the production schedule" (Dyer­Witheford and de Peuter 2006, 609). According to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), crunch time is "omnipresent" in the gaming industry (2004, 18). Gaming companies justify crunch time by pointing to looming deadlines such as a release date that will be in time to catch the Christmas rush (IGDA 2004, 18), and yet Nick Dyer­Witheford and Greig de Peuter describe crunch time as "apparently" unusual because, in fact, companies in the tech industry rely on crunch time as a cost­saving mechanism that is built into the corporate culture. Indeed, "normalized crunch time…points to a very elementary economic fact: it is a good deal, a steal in fact, for game companies" (2006, 609). In other words, from the perspective of games companies, crunch time panics are a planned feature of the working environment, not a bug. Such working conditions are made possible in large part by the exploitation of the blurry boundary between labor and fandom.